Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of India, K.G. Balakrishnan made a very valid point recently when he said that even as the courts of India hearing the largest number of cases in the world zealously guard the rights and liberties of the people, the arrears in cases were still on the rise. He did not mention figures but we have it from the Global Corruption Report 2007 on Corruption in Judicial Systems that as of February 2006 there were 33, 635 cases pending in the Supreme Court with 26 judges, 3.34 lakh cases in the High courts with 670 judges and 2.5 cases in 13,304 subordinate courts.
According to the Report, the ratio of judges in India is 12 to 13 per million people compared to 107 in the United States, 75 in Canada and 51 in the United Kingdom. At the current rate of disposal of cases, it would take 350 years to dispose of pending cases. So what is the answer?
It would seem that some high courts have introduced ?evening courts?, ?mobile courts? and ?e-courts? to make justice accessible to the remotest areas. As Justice Balakrishnan put it, ?it is imperative to introduce innovative and creative solutions to tackle? the current situation. What are these ?creative? solutions? If, for example, people belonging to the same caste have a Caste Court, can the caste chieftains or leaders serve to settle disputes among the litigants? Would the legal system accept the rulings of Caste Courts as just and equitable? If reports are to be believed, such courts have sprung up in recent times and are rendering signal service to the people. There is, e.g. Human Rights Protection Foundation of Udupi and the Consumer Forum of Basroor who have, in the last 27 years tackled 23,000 cases without charging a rupee, nor accepting any grant from either the Karnataka or Government of India. These two bodies are examples, of reducing the burden on the judiciary.
That apart, what is shocking is that many of the cases are trivial and do not need legal expertise for their quick resolution. All that is required is ordinary common sense and a sense of fairplay. A recent case involving a woman ?scavenger? working for a Government Training School for Women in Karnataka makes it abundantly clear. This is the story.
On November 21, 1929 the headmistress of the Training School appointed a sweeper cum scavenger, named Sesi on a monthly salary of six rupees. Sesi belonged to the lowest of low castes. Some time in 1971 Sesi died and her daughter Akku approached the headmistress of the school for her mother'sjob. This was sanctioned on July 12, 1971. The wages were raised to fifteen rupees. The approval appointment came six months after Akku joined duty but that doesn'tmatter. A letter of the School Headmistress addressed to the Commissioner of Public Instruction, Bangalore, dated September 19, 1998 said that Akku and a fellow scavenger, Leela?also appointed in June 1971?were full-time employees and full-time work was extracted from them. Leela'swork consisted of cleaning seven urinals and five latrines seven days a week and Akku'swork consisted of sweeping 21 classroom, also everyday of the year. Both the employees reportedly were supposed to fill in ?temporary posts? with their wages paid from ?contingency funds?.
In a letter to the Secretary of the Department of Education, Karnataka dated November 4, 1992 Akku mentioned that she had been working for the past 20 years in a ?temporary post? and appealed that the post be made permanent. Unbelievable but true, Departmental inquiries took five long years to come to any conclusion! Eventually, on July 9,1997, the Secretary to the Government of Karnataka wrote to say that the posts held by both Akku and Leela ?cannot be made permanent??this after they had been working continuously for two decades! Time passed. Then a strange thing happened. While both Akku and Leela continued to work, their wages were stopped as from January1, 1998. Neither of the women knew how to handle the situation until the matter was raised by a Human Rights organisation with the Commissioner of Public Instruction (CPI) on July 23, 2003 when the headmistress of the school requested the CPI to release wages due to the women amounting to Rs 1.16 lakh.
The women thereupon appealed to the Karnataka Administrative Tribunal (KAT) against the CPI which looked into the case and ordered regularisation of services of the two scavenger-sweepers as a ?social ameliorative measure?, specifying that the order be obeyed within 90 days. CPI dithered. Akku thereupon made a representation to the Education Department on November 27, 2003 to get the KAT order implemented. Once again the government dithered and appealed to the Karnataka High Court to dismiss the KAT order.
On October 4, 2004 the High Court dismissed the CPI appeal. Thereafter, shocking as it sounds, notice was issued to government officers for not implementing the KAT order. At this point the Government Advocate, M.B. Prabhakar wrote to the head of the Legal Cell, Department of Education, Bangalore informing the latter that this was a ?fit case? to take to the Supreme Court. On November 10, 2004, the Karnataka Government authorised a Supreme Court Advocate, Sanjay R. Hegde to file a Special Leave Petition against the Karnataka High Court'sfinal order at the Supreme Court. Incidentally, it is now 2007 and the two women are still working without being paid! Something of a record. There are no legal intricacies here.
Both the women have been and are full-time workers. And they have been working now for over three decades, cleaning latrines and sweeping classroom floors. And they have not been paid since 1998 or for nine long years. What sort of justice is this? If such injustice can be done to two poor illiterate women, what justice can one expect in more complicated cases pending in the courts?some 2.5 crore in all? Does anyone care? In the case of these two women a local Human Rights Organisation took up cudgels on their behalf but how many of the 2.5 crore cases can expect such help? Does it require a Supreme Court intervention to do justice to two unhappy illiterate women who have not been paid a single paise for nearly a decade? How are they expected to live? There are no answers. Does Justice Balakrishnan have any?
The truth is that our government departments are insensitive to human suffering. When a government servant is pulled up, his (or her) instinctive reaction is to appeal go a higher court. There is no end to litigation. This is where the problem lies. The number of courts may be increased at all level; the courts may sit for longer hours, even curtail their holidays. But in the end the solution lies in changing the mind-set of people and that'sa job not for the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court but for social reformers and the media.
